NIHR Sheffield BRC
Equality Diversity and Inclusion 

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is embedded throughout Sheffield BRC to further develop EDI principles across the BRC Training Academy and within our Healthcare and Technology themes. The EDI Co-Leads work with an expert team of Community Engagement, Ethnic Diversity and Primary Care leaders, a senior research fellow and a PhD student to promote more inclusive research involvement, participation and engagement across themes, and support the submission of proposals to research funders. The team also includes a Primary Care nurse to support the Primary Care Lead, in collaboration with Primary Care Sheffield (PCS), to link Sheffield BRC to diverse communities within the Sheffield/South Yorkshire region, including underserved populations.

The EDI team are working closely with the PPIE coordinator to develop a community outreach engagement programme to broaden the reach of Sheffield BRC. We aim to deliver inclusive, innovative and interdisciplinary training in translational Experimental Medicine. 

The EDI strategies of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and The University of Sheffield reflect the communities served and share the vision to actively attract, engage and develop talented individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Dr Shoba Dawson

Senior EDI Fellow

Professor Elizabeth Goyder

EDI Co-Lead

Professor Ade Adebajo

EDI Co-Lead

Dr Susan Baxter

Community Engagement Lead

Professor Parveen Ali

Ethnic Diversity Lead

Dr Jon Dickson

Primary Care Lead

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy 2022-2027

The NIHR Sheffield BRC has collaborated with the NIHR Sheffield CRF to develop a joint strategy for EDI, which will be implemented between 2022-2027. The full strategy can be read here. 

The NIHR Sheffield BRC and CRF are committed to promoting and embedding EDI through all aspects of our work.

Diversity in all its forms delivers greater impact in our research and enhances the experience of our patients, communities, and workforce. By working collaboratively with our partners we will create a thriving inclusive research environment that provides widened access and public confidence in health and care research; an environment that attracts and supports a diverse range of world leading staff, fostering equal opportunity for everyone to achieve their potential.

Through embedding these principles we will foster the development of a culture of Impact, Excellence, Inclusion, Collaboration, and Effectiveness.

Trial Forge Inclusive Research Centre - Sheffield

Sheffield Clinical Trials Research Unit (CTRU) is a Trial Forge Inclusive Research Centre.

Sheffield CTRU is a UKCRC-registered clinical trials unit that provides advice and practical support to investigators planning or running clinical trials. Many of our projects are run in collaboration with the Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research.

Our Trial Forge Inclusive Research Centre aims to increase evidence base for methodological approaches to increase inclusivity in trials therefore improving trial decision making, relevance and generalisability. Trial Forge has published some practical guidance on how to recruit and retain ethnic minority groups in trials.

If you are planning a trial, please consider embedding inclusive approaches to reach and recruit people from diverse backgrounds to your study. This includes accounting for intersectionality within your trial.


Find out more about Sheffield Clinical Trials Research Unit (CTRU) here.

Find out more about Trial Forge here.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Resources

Trial Forge Guidance 3

Trial Forge Guidance 3: randomised trials and how to recruit and retain individuals from ethnic minority groups—practical guidance to support better practice

Randomised trials, especially those intended to directly inform clinical practice and policy, should be designed to reflect all those who could benefit from the intervention under test should it prove effective. This does not always happen. The UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) INCLUDE project identified many groups in the UK that are under-served by trials, including ethnic minorities.

This guidance document presents four key recommendations for designing and running trials that include the ethnic groups needed by the trial. These are (1) ensure eligibility criteria and recruitment pathway do not limit participation in ways you do not intend, (2) ensure your trial materials are developed with inclusion in mind, (3) ensure staff are culturally competent and (4) build trusting partnerships with community organisations that work with ethnic minority groups. Each recommendation comes with best practice advice, public contributor testimonials, examples of the inclusion problem tackled by the recommendation, or strategies to mitigate the problem, as well as a collection of resources to support implementation of the recommendations.

We encourage trial teams to follow the recommendations and, where possible, evaluate the strategies they use to implement them. Finally, while our primary audience is those designing, running and reporting trials, we hope funders, grant reviewers and approvals agencies may also find our guidance useful.

Click here to access the full article. 

Questions to think about when planning translation 

This text and examples were provided in January 2022 by Rosilda Panoni, In-Trans Coordinator at Grampian Regional Equality Council, UK (http://in-trans.co.uk).  

Here are some questions that may help a trial team think through their translation needs before speaking to a translation organisation: 

Identify your needs 

Translation project

Optimise your files 

Interpreting project

Budgeting 

Exemplar costs for translation

Example costs for using In-trans at Grampian Regional Equality Council. Follow below our rates for interpreting and translations jobs. 

Translation

Cost of translation is based in the number of English words. Translation above 200 words: 

For languages Group 1 (Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Lithuania, etc) will be £0.10p per word plus VAT 

For languages Group 2 (Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) will be £0.12p per word plus VAT 

Translation under 200 words will be charged £30.00 

Formatting will be charged £30.00 per hour (if necessary) 

Proof of reading will be charged £0.08 per word (if necessary) 

Interpreting

The rate of interpreting is £30.00+ VAT for up to one hour during office hours (8:00-17:00) and after the first hour by the minute. 

There is no travel fee in the cases below: 

In other cases, travel expenses occur. We always inform you about it in advance, so that you can decide if you pay for the travel or prefer to change the date/ time of the appointment to have an interpreter locally. 

The charge of travelling time is £18.00 up to one hour and any time over one hour will be charged on a minute basis. The travel rate per mile is £0.48p 

Cancellation will be accepted at any time. However, by our policies, cancellations occurring 24 hours before the appointment will be charged for the first hour. An appointment cancelled over the 24 hours before the appointment will not be charged. 


Example costings 

These examples were provided in January 2022 by Dr Andrew Willis, Centre for Ethnic Health Research, University of Leicester, UK. 

Example costing 1. Animated recruitment video
Background
Production of a 2-3 minute recruitment animated video to support recruitment of participants with lower levels of English literacy to a large national trial taking place in an acute hospital setting. The animation and voiceover were co-designed and produced by patients and carers from ethnic minority communities during 3 workshops facilitated by designers and trial researchers. 

The team followed an established methodology for translation to maintain content validity, including clinician review to check clinical accuracy (Patel N, Willis A, Stone M, Barber S, Gray L, Davies M, et al. Developing a conceptually equivalent type 2 diabetes risk score for Indian Gujaratis in the UK. Journal of diabetes research. 2016;2016 ). The video was developed by an in-house design team using Vyond software (https://www.vyond.com). Translation of the script was done in-house, with two translators for each language, one of whom recorded the voiceover 

Co design workshops x 3, Video storyboarding, production and refinement, review of final version: £2500
Production of 2-3 min animated video in English, 2 stage translation dubbed into 4 languages (Polish, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi) with pilot testing: £3000
Training sessions to cover video dissemination within the main trial: £750 

Total cost £6250 


Example costing 2. Questionnaire translation
Background
Translation of a (Approximately 2000 words) paper based self-assessment risk score for type 2 diabetes from English into Urdu. The research team followed an established translational model of firstly simplifying the English version and development of conceptual guidance for translators to follow. This was followed by forwards translation from English to Urdu using two qualified translators and then back translation from English to Urdu. Translators had to hold a diploma in public service interpreting and they were recruited from different translation companies locally. Once all translators were happy with the final version, it was reviewed by two Urdu literate clinicians and piloted with a group of 10-15 community members to check reading age, level of understanding and ease of use 

Researcher salary costs (recruitment, project management: £1750
Payments for translators: £2250
Community member/clinician vouchers: £250
Design costs: £750 

Total cost £5000 

SupporTing Recruitment and retention Improvements for Diverse Ethnicities (STRIDE) 

The STRIDE project involved discussion in late 2022/early 2023 with ten panels of public contributors, trialists, health professionals and others. These panels discussed a total of 23 trials with the aim of saying which ethnic groups the trials needed to include and what proportion of the trial population they should be.


While considering a particular trial, panels sometimes provided advice on how a trial team might have answered the question about the ethnic groups to be included.  Additionally, having listened to ideas and suggestions from many individuals and panels across multiple trials and disease areas, the STRIDE team itself reflected on what might be useful advice for trial teams grappling with how to decide which ethnic groups their trial needs. 


This led to eight recommendations. Click here to read these recommendation and for more information. 

NIHR INCLUDE framework

NIHR-INCLUDE was commissioned by the NIHR CRN to address the lack of representation in health and care research with the following vision:


‘provide better health and care through more inclusive research’



The NIHR-INCLUDE Guidelines provide:


Some areas have been addressed at the level of individual communities or projects, whereas other areas require action at national or supra-national level, to provide appropriate regulatory, funding, governance guidance and support.



The NIHR INCLUDE frameworks can be found here.

Research Design Service EDI Toolkit

This resource has been developed to support researchers to better understand how to embed EDI in research design and to meet the NIHR’s EDI requirements. The toolkit advocates for best practice which goes beyond the NIHR's current requirements. 


Click here to visit the the EDI Toolkit page.

NIHR Hidden Figures: Celebrating diversity in healthcare research


Written by Shamaila Anwar and Tara-Sienna Hartman.

Designed by Simon Golphin.